(This post will be a little on light on analysis. More thoughts will be rolling out later!)

Praise the fujoshi goddesses. After entering the ticket raffle for Yuri!!! on Stage over and over, I managed to finally score two tickets to the afternoon movie theater viewing in Akishima, Tokyo.

Some love from Chris before the show.

Yuri!!! on Stage resembles other voice actor events popular with other series. Amiable voice actors entering and exiting the stage, engaging in a variety of talk show corners, answering questions, and playing quiz games. The following is a bullet point of the most memorable parts:

Hiroki Yasumoto (Chris Giacometti) was well aware of his character’s (m)ass appeal. After basically introducing him as “Chris of the butts,” he showed off his own derriere to the audience midway through the show and, if memories serve right, checked out the others voice actor’s buttocks as well.

Junichi Suwabe (Victor Nikiforov) dressed up as Victor for the event and carried around the tissue box cover Makkachin. He even dyed his hair silver, much to the concern of his hairdresser he admitted.

Baby-faced but mischevious Ayumu Murase (Kenjirō Minami) admitted that he looked up to Kouki Uchiyama (Yuri Plisetsky) during a Q and A corner. In response to this fact, the hosts and other voice actors ushered Uchiyama on stage so Ayumu to talk to him one-on-one. Murase, now in the spotlight, instantly laid on his feminine charms heavily and practically made Uchiyama run off stage.

Though Mamoru Miyano (JJ Leroy) did not grace the stage with his presence, he still nearly took over the show with a video appearance that was….very JJ-esque.

The voice actors performed a drama written specifically for the event. Mitsurou Kubo stated that she wrote this with content that couldn’t appear on television.

Summary: Almost all the skaters from the series gather to Hasetsu to perform an ice show with Victor during the offseason. The scene begins with Yuri throwing up and wearing Victor’s underwear on his head and Victor missing after a night of drunken partying.

Confused and mystified by the Russian someone wrote on his back, Yuri tries to piece together what happened the night before with the help of the other skaters.

Twelve hours earlier, Yuri and friends held a party at Yutopia, and even though Yuri says it’s a bad idea, he ends up drinking far too much. Amid the chaos that unfolds (and a kiss shared between Nishigori and Seung-Gil???), Yuri and Victor begin stretching. As Victor stretches Yuri, Yuri says that shachoko, a mythical Japanese fish, is more flexible. Victor mistakes shachihoko as a girl’s name Sha Chihoko, and becomes jealous that Yuri remembers another lover. Angered, Victor goes off on his own, causing Phichit to exclaim that Yuri and Victor are divorcing.

After Yuri figures out what happened, he hears that Victor is stretching on Hasetsu Castle naked. Yuri rushes over to him, and Victor declares he doesn’t care who Sha Choko is, Yuri is his now. He also commands Yuri to strip and join him with stretching.

Phichit ends the drama by shouting that his friends are remarrying after seeing their reconciliation.

This is merely a hot take after the event. As time goes on, I’ll add more details as well as thoughts.

Since my last post, much has changed in my life: senior thesis finished, college over, life in the United States temporary over. For those who read Yowlingyaoi, I apologize for my sudden disappearance. However, I plan to revive this blog from its unannounced hiatus and continue having dialogues about Boys’ Love for the years to come.

Will be posting soon!

Yuri on Ice, Episode 3 (If you haven’t seen this series yet, I recommend you do. I’ll be discussing it quite a bit this winter.)

Apologies…this week I am moving and a little crunched for time…so following is a list of eclectic doujinshi containing nuggets of quality (not guaranteed). Hope you enjoy it! (Next week yowlingyoai will attempted to return to academia…sorry for the recent decline in whatever quality there had been…)

Before delving into a meaty discussion, these next couple of weeks will be the appetizers and salad. (I guess last week was really just the first round of drinks if we were going to push the metaphor beyond palpability…)

So, onto an Part I of an overview of BL featuring fatherhood as a major plot point that will be discussed in future posts:

Hideyoshico-The Komukai Household’s Circumstances (2013)

Written from the viewpoint of the son, Hideyoshico’s oneshot endeavors to create a realism capturing the tension between a “nonconventional” is a heavily conventional society. While short, Hideyoshico applies her uniquely frank portrayal of human emotions to a small family drama, magnifying what on the surface may seem insignificant but is fact fraught with wider social (and potentially political) implications.

Kotobuki Tarako-Sex Pistols (2004)

Narratively a mess and as classy as its name suggests, Kotobuki’s Sex Pistols dwells on the reproduction through all means possible. Sex Pistols is less about fatherhood than it is about the procurement of children. While this is not a manga one should take seriously, it nonetheless is a “classic” with its treatment of male pregnancy.

Matsuo Maata-Usotsuki wa Shinshi no Hajimari (2010)

Unlike many BL that presents childrearing between the male lovers as an integral aspect of their relationship, Matsuo’s manga creates a point of tension in the manga by the presence of a child. Using the child as an manifestations of a characters “heterosexuality,” Matsuo illuminates the struggles one encounters when one’s individual desire does not match with societies prescribed desires.

Next Week: Continuation of the overview and a BL vs. Yaoi vs. Shounen Ai

Early this year, Japanese popular mobage company DeNA released the smartphone app Manga Box. Not only is it a free app featuring manga published by Kodansha, it also released most of the series simultaneously in Japanese and English. With Spoof on Titan as one of the headlining series, the app appeared to host manga appealing to a more populist, and at times bland, taste by increments of eight pages. Nestled between the puzzling The Great Phrases Women Fall For and humorous The Host-Man is a unexpected shounen ai series, Sugu Neruko’s Mabataki no Aida. Translated in English as In a Heartbeat, Neruko’s Boy’s Love story following childhood friends Haru and Hide is an exercise in restraint, perhaps a necessary exercise in a genre oozing with indulgences. Narratively tight and efficiently paneled, In a Heartbeat hones in on a realism centered on sexual identity and its social realities that has increasingly become common in the Boy’s Love genre over the years. Albeit, In a Heartbeat is not entirely resistant to the motifs of genre, such as the ever problematic “I don’t love men, I love you,” nor is it particularly trailblazing in terms of plot. Yet, its placement as a mainstream manga in the DeNa app is perhaps telling of an acceptance or at least destigmatization of shounen ai. Rather than exorcizing homosexual relationships, Manga Box hosts it side by side to traditional (and non-traditional) hetersexual love stories. While In a Heartbeat still probably appeals primarily to a female audience, perhaps this manga is a sign of Boy’s Love manga transitioning from its distinction as a “Boy’s Love” story to a “love story.”

All this aside, I primarily bring up In a Heartbeat due to its treatment of fatherhood and non-traditional families. Over these next couple of weeks, I wish to explore the potential meanings of fatherhood in Boy’s Love using In a Heartbeat among other series as primarily examples. Through the exploration of fatherhood as particular facet of masculinity, we can perhaps piece together the culture of fatherhood as consumed and created by a segment of the Japanese female population (i.e. fujoshi).

Looking back on the past two posts about K: Missing Kings and Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku, I realize now how confusing Azuma’s “Theory of Database Consumption” is. This post will attempt to straighten out his theory and how it is a starting point to understand fandom studies and perhaps fujoshi consumption.

When Azuma introduces his database consumption theory, he first mentions Ostuka Eiji’s Theory of Narrative Consumption, an 1989 book among the first to discuss otaku in an academic arena.

Here is a break down of this theory of narrative consumption:

-Media, be it be it books, anime, etc, draws from a “grand narrative”

-A “grand narrative” comprises of larger ideologies, settings, and world-views that shapes how the consumer interprets the world

-The media acts as packets of a “smaller narrative,” though at times, they posit themselves as a “grand narrative” in and of itself

-To gain a grasp of the larger “grand narrative,” otaku consumer these smaller narratives that act as gateways to the larger narrative

-Derivative works, for example doujinshi, operates within the same scope of original work’s worldview in order to be counted in a gray space between “real” and “fake.”

-The rise of derivative works, i.e. simulacra (see this link for an explanation) blue the line between “real” and “fake” so long as the work operates with the same worldview

For an example…take Pokemon. With each Pokemon version, we are buying a “narrative,” a game mediates how we view the world (or at least the video game world.) However, there are multiple versions of Pokemon games, and each game is really a small part of the bigger Pokemon world.

With narrative consumption, meaning is predetermined by the grand narrative. However, Azuma worked in an era during the 1990s when ideas of the “grand narrative” began to deteriorate with the popularization of postmodernism (see here for an explanation of postmodernism). Azuma instead operates with the idea that meaning is determined by the consumer “reading up” the database. Here is a breakdown of Azuma’s theory of database consumption.

-Database consumption arises with postmodernism

-Database consumption or the database model has a double layer, the first layer consisting of a “database” of information, or more concretely, traits or motifs

-The second layer are the former “small narratives,” or media that uses various parts of the database

-The consumer, who both gives meaning to the bits of information in the database and consumes these bits, reads these “small narratives” and gives meaning to it

-Agency lies in the consumer, and so derivative works do not need to align themselves with the “worldview” of its origin and instead gain its own meaning from the consumer

-The consumers desires can be mediated by the database, or in other words, tastes can be categorized and articulated by components of the database.

Working from this view, let’s look at Tiger and Bunny doujinshi. More often than not, these works have very little to do with the original Tiger and Bunny anime series. However, these works are still recognized by consumers as a viable and purchasable work because it is deemed worthy by the consumer and fits their desires mediated by the database. Such as the fujoshi who prefers Barnaby x Kotetsu. She turns to doujinshi that fit her tastes and determines the work’s meaning and importance through consumption and “reading up” the database components that would be in this case a specific coupling or how the characters are drawn.

Hopefully this clears up Azuma’s theory…for more on this, check out his book Otaku: Japan’s Databse Animal. It is a bit dated and neglects female fujoshi, but a surprising palpable academic work.

(Note: Since the first of the month coincides with Friday, Fujoshi Friday will continue next week with an examination of Azuma’s theory of database consumption.)

Much like the Kumi, a central character whose name is spelled with kanji “bitterness,” Kumota Haruko steeps Shinjuku Lucky Hole in the bittersweet shades of human emotions, a surprising twist for what would seem to be a light hearted, smutty manga about the gay adult video industry. Yes, there is plenty of smut, and paired with Kumota’s supple art style that endows even middle age men with a youthful attractiveness, Shinjuku Lucky Hole satiates even the most discerning of BL connoisseurs. With light bondage, bukakke, virgin experiences, reversible couples, yazuka love, high schoolers, and megane, this manga is a party platter of typical BL motifs. However, Haruko softens these erotic elements, subtly flavoring them with unrequited love, disappointment, and complicated intimate relationships, the dominate one being between the above-mentioned Kumi and his would-be-pimp, Sakuma.

Though the core of the manga’s plot, Kumi and Sakuma’s “love” story does not appear until the end, instead obscured by tales of dead end trysts among side characters and Kumi and Sakuma. Indeed, the manga does not follow a traditional sense of story pacing, forgoing linearity for more episodic sketches on the going-ons in the Lucky Hole AV company. Yet, this unconventionality mirrors the bond between Kumi and Sakuma, a business relationship seemingly forged by money but possessing a significance emotional and physical weight for both characters. Ultimately, the true fruit of their relationship remains elusive to the reader, awarding Kumi and Sakuma a contradictory veil of privacy in a genre that privileges the reader to the characters. While BL is arguably an exploitive genre, Kumota plays with this idea throughout Shinjuku Lucky Hole, swaying between “exploiting” her characters and regarding them with a degree of respect as exemplified in her thorough development of Kumi and Sakuma and deceptively simple paneling. While maintaining a touch of light humor, Shinjuku Lucky Hole delves into the darker gaps of society and human psyche to create sly BL manga that nourishes both the heart and the mind.